Posts for Tag:
yahoo finance

He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.

The above is a quote from a Yahoo Finance article about a Dublin University student who punked a bunch of newspapers with a fake Wikipedia quote from the recently deceased Maurice Jarre. Their obituary writers, in a mad scramble to rush out their copy, basically resorted to copying Wikipedia instead of doing actual research. I'm not so much irked by the fact that they use Wikipedia but that even after being caught, they still had the gall to think they weren't in the wrong (aside from The Guardian, of course). Just goes to show how a once great and arrogant industry can't even gracefully exit let alone innovate itself out of its current predicament.

I was at the local coffee shop the other day and while waiting for my drink, I browsed through a full stack of New York Times. It got me to thinking, when was the last time I actually bought a newspaper? This isn't a commentary on whether newspaper companies are dying (they are) but the curious observation that I actually don't read printed newspapers any more. I used to have a subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle but canceled that around 2003 once I realized that everything I was reading was old news. I had already gotten the sports scores from Sportscenter and ESPN.com, stock quotes and business articles from Yahoo Finance, even local news from SFGate.com. It just got to the point where I was tired of paying for stuff I had already read (plus having to take a sack of newspapers to the recycling bin each week).

Nationally recognized publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal might still have a printed news audience but eventually, I just can't see how even they can keep up with the increasingly real-time demand of content. To be fair, most newspaper companies have a website but when will the cost and inefficiency of printing newspapers outstrip the newspaper subscription fees generated, if it hasn't already? I'm sure there's a demographic of folks who enjoy sitting down with a nice cup of coffee and the paper (I used to be one of them), but those folks are dwindling in number.